Todd on his trip to England: "One thing this trip to England made sure of, was that I could never become a Marxist. And you know the importance of Marxism in France. I didn't trust words the way the French do. I mean a lot of writers in France get totally carried away by words, whether it's Malraux or Bernard Henri-Levy. They may come to the right conclusion but they get drunk on words. Sentences have a poetical beauty. But the verification principle just doesn't apply."

Todd on Sartre: "I think that Sartre, like many intellectuals, should have spent more time writing and less time standing on a crate in front of Billancourt, harrying the workers. There's no reason why intellectuals should be competent, particularly literary intellectuals, to deal with politics."

Todd on Jean-Marie Le Pen: "Le Pen is a nasty character, and some of the people around him are even nastier than he is. It's absolutely true that he represents xenophobia and racism."

Todd on his reporting of the Vietnam War for Le Nouvel Observateur: "I did support Hanoi and the Vietcong for many years...I changed my mind much too late. Its obvious that when I landed in Vietnam in February 1965 for the first time that I should have know what was actually going on. It took me from 1965 to 1973 to see the light. I mean, how slow can you be?"